Dave Winer, 56, is a software developer and editor of the Scripting News weblog. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School and NYU, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

You might get an STD if you have unprotected sex, but even the smartest people from time to time throw caution to the wind. In the heat of the moment.

Look, no one likes it when you shout Fire in a movie theater when everyone is really loving the movie. But if there's a fire you should probably ignore people's prefs and shout anyway. Like the people who said it was a bubble when housing prices kept going up, when we're fighting two wars but feeling no pain at home. Something was wrong with that picture.

Something is wrong with today's picture too. There isn't room for every college undergrad to drop out and start a new company. VCs that encourage this, and it seems they all do, are no better than mortgage brokers that put immigrants who couldn't speak English into McMansions.

All these fake startups need us to let them have our personal data, the same way the mortgage arbitrageurs needed all those junk mortgages to bundle up into AAA securities. The companies the VCs are starting now are garbage too. The kids who are jumping out of college to get rich are screwing themselves. And the universities that are shoveling their kids out of the door, some even saying openly they want to make money off the next Zuck or Gates, a lot of them are going to go the way of Lehman Brothers. And I don't think there's going to be much in the way of bailouts coming for them.

All you need for a bubble is a steady stream of suckers.

It's all connected. The fact that they're pushing our data up into the cloud is just one more facet of it. You can be sure they're not being squeaky clean about what they do with this data. If you think ethics are big in boardrooms in Silicon Valley, you have yourself to blame because the facts that say otherwise are staring you in the face.

You might get an STD if you have unprotected sex, but then even the smartest people from time to time just go ahead and throw caution to the wind. In the passion of the moment.

Look, no one likes it when you shout Fire in a movie theater when everyone is really loving the movie. But if there's a fire you should probably ignore people's prefs and shout anyway.

Like the people who said it was a bubble when housing prices kept going up, when we're fighting two wars but feeling no pain at home. Something was wrong with that picture.

Something is wrong with today's picture too. There isn't room for every college undergrad to drop out and start a new company. VCs that encourage this, and it seems they all do, are no better than mortgage brokers that found immigrants who couldn't speak English to put in McMansions.

VCs that fund business plans that say I'm going to be the next Zuck or the next Twitter are just as bad.

And it's all very much related. They need us to let them have all our personal data, the same way the mortgage arbitrageurs needed all those junk mortgages to bundle up into securities, to get AAA ratings. The companies the VCs are starting now are garbage too. The kids who are jumping out of college to get rich are screwing themselves. And the universities that are shoveling their kids out of the door, some even saying openly they want to make money off the next Zuck or Gates, a lot of them are going to go the way of Lehman Brothers. And I don't think there's going to be much in the way of bailouts coming for them.

All you need for a bubble is a steady stream of suckers.

It's all connected. The fact that they're pushing our data up into the cloud is just one more facet of it. You can be sure they're not being squeaky clean about what they do with this data. If you think ethics are big in boardrooms in Silicon Valley, you have yourself to blame because the facts that say otherwise are staring you in the face.

I got a bug report yesterday that said that River2 no longer works properly with Atom feeds from blogspot.com. I looked into it, and saw the behavior that was reported.

I'm not at all sure what happened. But if you have some knowledge about how this is supposed to work, have a look at this feed, and look at an <entry>. See how it has a lot of link elements? Which one is supposed to point to the article? Is that part of some standard? Are other sites doing it this way, or just blogspot.com?

If it were RSS, I'd be looking for a guid element with isPermaLink true. If that weren't present, I'd accept a link element. I'm looking for the same thing from this Atom feed. I want to give the user a pointer to the article that's being linked to from the feed.

It looks to me like that's the link with the rel attribute equal to "alternate." But I don't know, and I don't want to modify the code that's meant to deal with generic Atom feeds if this is just a workaround for blogspot.com.

The usual caveat that this could be my bug, not theirs.

Also it would be helpful to see any changenotes or technotes from Google that explains how we're meant to interpret their Atom feeds. Would help increase confidence.